1. Field
This disclosure relates to systems and methods for acquiring aerial images.
2. Background Art
The field of aerial imagery is concerned with capturing photographs of land masses over large areas, wherein cameras are generally flown by aircraft. In aerial imagery one distinguishes between nadir images and oblique images. Nadir images are photographed using a camera that faces straight down, whereas oblique images are generated using cameras that are oriented at an angle to the ground. Aerial photographs are often combined. For example, an image mosaic can be made by stitching several photographs taken with one or more cameras.
Using traditional commercial systems, there are constraints on the size of photographs that can be taken due to the small size of cameras that can be incorporated in a standard airplane. Due to the limited field of view of traditional systems, an airplane must make many passes over a land mass in order to photograph a large area. There is a need for innovations to counter this problem so that larger areas can be photographed with small cameras, thus reducing the number of flights over a given land mass.
In order to accurately capture land masses and vegetation such as trees, it is also important to be able to photograph images in the near-infrared as well visual parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.